In Texas the southern limit of the range was close to the Gulf coast. As it swung north, it kept close to the outer edge of the woodlands through Arkansas and Missouri to the Missouri River, then down the north bank of that stream to the Mississippi, down its east bank to the Ohio, and up the north bank of the Ohio to the mouth of the Tennessee. The Tennessee River was the southern boundary across that state to Chattanooga.
The buffalo found in the Carolinas and southeastern Georgia appear to have come from the north, from the herds that had gone up the Great Valley into Virginia and so passed the last of the mountains. One small band was reported far from the restin the extreme southwestern tip of Georgia in 1686. They seem to have been strays and probably were killed off in a short time, for there is no further mention of them.
Within this vast area the buffalo roamed in uncounted millions. Several people have attempted in various ways to arrive at a reasonable total, their results varying from a low of 30 million to a high of 200 million. Since the grazing lands did not appear to be overstocked when the first white explorers visited them, perhaps the lower figure should be taken. But whatever figure is taken, it is only a guess, and an error of 10 or 20 million would have little significance now.
While the total buffalo population was enormous, the individual bands were small. One of the hide hunters of the 1870's, Frank Mayer, left records on the size of the bands he encountered in his several years of hunting, during which he brought to market over 10,000 hides, almost all of them from animals he found in small bands. He said that a band of more than sixty was most unusual, and he never saw a band of over two hundred. Bands of about fifteen were the most common, with some being as small as three. This hunter killed all or almost all the animals in more than a thousand separate bands.
For a large part of each year there would be no bulls with the band. The bulls might be feeding within a mile or less, but they were not regular members of any group, which consisted of a few cows with their current crop of calves, and the yearlings and two-year-olds from the previous two crops. One of the cows would be accepted as the leader on whom the rest depended for guidance. She went where she liked, and the rest followed. She chose the time to go to water, and when to move to new grazing. In time of danger she led the dash for safety, but when she got into trouble the others did not know what to do. They just milled around her in hopeless confusion.
When the country was covered by herds scattered as far as the eye could see, the number of buffalo was beyond counting, but a trained observer could take a quick count of the bands close by and make a considered estimate of the rest. General Isaac I. Stevens remarked on the unending herds when he and his party were in northern Dakota conducting a survey for a transcontinental railway. These men were all experienced observers.
July 10, 1853. About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the partysome as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000. I had heard of the myriads of these animals inhabiting the plains, but I could not realize the truth of these accounts till today, when they surpassed anything I could have imagined from the accounts which I had received.
Grazing animals such as buffalo cannot remain in large, closely packed herds for any length of time or they will soon starve. Hence the small herds were usually found scattered over a wide expanse, with several hundred yards of open space around each band. Travelers could pass through these open spaces without stampeding the herds, and might take days to make the passage. Coronado, on his visit to the buffalo country in 1541, reported, ''I came upon plains so vast that I did not reach their end, although I marched over them for more than three hundred leagues [about a thousand miles]. On them I found so many cattle it would be impossible to estimate their numbers for there was not a single day until my return that I lost sight of them." This march through the buffalo country lasted three months, and led from just east of the Pecos River into the Texas Panhandle and north to the Great Bend of the Arkansas. The buffalo seen each day were new animals, except for the few occasions when a herd stampeded in the direction of the line of march.
A person today attempting to visualize such herds would need quite an imagination. He might start by visiting the bison range in western Montana and see what a far-ranging herd 700 animals make when they are grazing. Then he could take a map of North America and fill it with dots, each one representing a herd, fifty here, a hundred there, and perhaps a thousand at a time in the heart of the Great Plains, until he has put in 40,000 dots. But no matter how he approaches the task, the tally of the great animals will be in the tens of millions.
Disguised in wolf skins, Catlin and a guide creep close to an unconcerned buffalo herd. When unable to smell their enemies, the nearsighted, dull buffalo made easy targets. (Oil painting by George Catlin, Smithsonian Institution)
Indians surround and slaughter buffalo. Hunters aimed at the buffalo's side, behind the last rib and a third of the distance from backbone to belly, where a weapon could more easily penetrate the intestinal cavity. (Painting by A. J. Miller, The Walters Art Gallery)
5. Horses for the Buffalo Hunters
Beginning 4,000 years ago wild horsemen poured down from the Iranian Plateau south and west into the fertile Euphrates Valley, to the consternation and terror of the farming villages along the river. Ever since that time wild tribes from the grasslands of the world, dashing about on their spirited mounts, have captured the imagination of sedentary people. With horsemen dominating the wide expanse of the Asiatic Steppes and the grasslands of North Africa, European explorers and traders from the Atlantic seaboard were not surprised to find equally wild horsemen occupying the grassy Great Plains of the American west.
During the first half of the nineteenth century travelers usually assumed that the Plains tribes must have used horses for many centuries. The Indians all the way from the eastern edge of the prairies to the Cascade Range, 2,000 miles to the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian forests all had large horse herds and a colorful, highly developed horse culture, complete with trappings, gear, methods of training, and many legends. All of this would indicate a long period of development.
Then historians, delving into the records of early Spanish and French explorers west of the Mississippi, found that the horses had come to the Indians from the Spanish colonies of New Mexico. The highly developed horse culture of the Plains had been borrowed bodily from the Spanish, and had then been enriched with a few gaudy Indian trappings.
Excavations of fossil deposits throughout the west have uncovered a large number of bones and many complete skeletons of horses that ranged the region for a few million years but were wiped out by a mysterious disaster 15,000 years ago. Hence when the Spanish brought horses to the plains in the sixteenth century, not even a trace of horse lore remained among the Indian tribes. Because the horse played such an important part in the lives of the Plains Indians, and especially in their buffalo hunting, details of its introduction and rapid spread throughout the whole western country are of importance to anthropologists and historians.
Francisco Coronado, searching for the fabulous Seven Cities of Cibola and their reputed treasure hordes, traveled east from the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico to the Texas Panhandle, then north into Kansas. Thus in the summer of 1541 he brought the first horses of modern times into the buffalo country. The Querecho Indians in northern Texas, who lived entirely off the buffalo, were not greatly impressed by the mounted Spanish band, strange as it was, and of imposing numbers (the chronicler of the expedition listed 1,500 people, most of them Indians from Mexico; 500 cattle and 5,000 sheepthe traveling commissary; and 500 horses). This same year, 1541, remnants of the expedition led by Hernando De Soto reached the Trinity River in Texas, on the southeastern edge of the buffalo country, with a small herd of horses.